Update - no beam before Thursday

Just as I was completing the last entry, news came in that another 18kV transformer has blown in point 8, and needs to be replaced. As a result, there will be no beam through ATLAS until Thursday evening. The machine may continue with single-turn tests.

All Quiet on the ATLAS front

After a fantastic start-up and following days, the LHC hit a teething problem when a power transformer blew at point 8. As a result, beam could not do full circuits and ATLAS has seen no beam since 12th September, but before that they had the beams circulating for lengthy periods, and had hoped for collisions this Thursday.
The power transformer has now been repaired using a spare from the CMS. The last sector is due back on Wednesday morning, at which point LHC comes out of the commissioning mode. I would guess that we will not see collisions before the weekend, but we have had such good progress in the last 10 days, who knows?!

Flash moves on an 'open' web page

For those struggling to access the flash movies I gave a link for yesterday, I have uploaded them to a page in Lancaster. Be warned, they are large (about 50MB).
http://www.hep.lancs.ac.uk/~rjones/startup_pictures/gallery.html
Forgive the other pictures on the page, they are for the local press in the Lancaster area for articles earlier this week.

Back to earth

After the excitement of yesterday, things are a little quieter today. The accelerator is intending to run with single beams from this afternoon and overnight. ATLAS identified some collisions between protons in the beam and gas in the beampipe overnight, a different sort of beam related event to the beam halo we saw yesterday. We are still trying to time-in the detectors, at which point we can go beyond the full reconstruction of the events (which can produce segements of tracks for example, even if the segments are out of time) and produce something more 'joined up' - at which point we can produce the analysis format.
The UK has received all its datasets, but we are currently struggling with a problem in the disk storage at RAL, which is actually caused by the complex software used to manage the files over the Grid. On the positive side, at least we saw the probelm before the real collision data starts!

Test go on, but I don't

The tests are continuing, with work currently concentrating on beam 2. There is also a very dense mass formed below this control room - but it is made up of ATLAS members all trying to see the 3-d video and have a little champagne. I am going over to do one more talk with the media, then celebrate today away from the control room. I will bring this blog up to date tomorrow morning with further news.

Beams around both rings

My updates are getting later, but at 17:35 local time the LHC got beams around both rings. This is I think further than people had reasonably hoped to get in the first day. However, I would be very surprised if they tried to bring anything into collision; the beams are only doing a few turns, and you need the rf system to keep them stable for longer.
Still, this is amazing progress, and the detector, software and offline computing all worked pretty well for ATLAS.

LHC goes for another beam injection; new pictures

The LHC are about to attempt to inject a beam once again. In the meantime, there are more images and a very nice FLASH graphic showing how well be have reconstructed the data so far in ATLAS at
http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/OPERATIONS/prodSys/atlasoracleadmin/10Sep2008/beam/index.php
If this is protected for general readers, I can copy the flash images elsewhere. (I am sure someone will let me know!)